Your choice of a tool or format should be calibrated to your own technical ability, frustration level, and willingness to invest time into the iterative process of composing within a new environment. Make a choice that is appropriate for yourself. Seek advice from your prof!
Here are some relatively easy or entry-level tools which can be adapted for literary experiment. Please use something besides Powerpoint. Anything besides powerpoint!
eDiastic - poetry generator (easy to hard); charNG is similar
Giotto - free, open source tool for creating animation and interactive Flash/SWF files. Windows only (?)
Tween - Tween light, tween max - an alternative to Adobe Flash for animation (prob. challenging)
New: SWFTools can be used to turn PDFs into a flash animation, and other tricks.
Code
None of the tools above involve writing code. If you have some experience or you would like to gain some experience thinking like a programmer, you might explore the Computer Science Education Week resources. None of these tutorials is aimed specifically at teaching you to make digital literature, but you can be creative and adapt if you're up for the challenge or curious. These are designed for K-12 kids, but you will find some (like MIT's Android App Inventor or Grok Learning's Chatterbot "Eliza" tutorial are quite powerful.
Feeling Ambitious? Digital writing Judy Malloy maintains a website investigating the tools that established digital poets and fiction writers have used over the years. Most may be challenging to gain proficiency, but since the purpose of our media experiments is to learn how to think with and through particular media forms/ technologies / interfaces, they might be worth exploring.
Models and Provocations
Media Experiments by IUP grads and undergrads
Tools
Your choice of a tool or format should be calibrated to your own technical ability, frustration level, and willingness to invest time into the iterative process of composing within a new environment. Make a choice that is appropriate for yourself. Seek advice from your prof!Here are some relatively easy or entry-level tools which can be adapted for literary experiment. Please use something besides Powerpoint. Anything besides powerpoint!
New: SWFTools can be used to turn PDFs into a flash animation, and other tricks.
Code
None of the tools above involve writing code. If you have some experience or you would like to gain some experience thinking like a programmer, you might explore the Computer Science Education Week resources. None of these tutorials is aimed specifically at teaching you to make digital literature, but you can be creative and adapt if you're up for the challenge or curious. These are designed for K-12 kids, but you will find some (like MIT's Android App Inventor or Grok Learning's Chatterbot "Eliza" tutorial are quite powerful.Feeling Ambitious?
Digital writing Judy Malloy maintains a website investigating the tools that established digital poets and fiction writers have used over the years. Most may be challenging to gain proficiency, but since the purpose of our media experiments is to learn how to think with and through particular media forms/ technologies / interfaces, they might be worth exploring.
http://www.narrabase.net/elit_software_links.html